Alex Jones (the politically elastic InfoWars host) and Attorney General Eric Holder (no introduction needed) both routinely rally their troops by crying wolf about police brutality. Jones encourages his libertarian followers to harass police and to view them as stormtroopers; Holder uses the power of the Executive Branch to warp criminal justice via the race card, imposing punitive oversight over state and local police on the grounds of “racial discrimination,” and encouraging minority populations to view police as racist persecutors.

So when police get assassinated by violent black power thugs or drug-addled white power wannabes, as happened to Officers Beck and Soldo in Las Vegas this week, Eric Holder and Alex Jones both deserve censure. Did they put the guns in the assassins’ hands? No. But they encourage such events, and then they exploit them for cheap political gain while police attend their colleagues’ funerals then put themselves on the line of fire again.

Officer Alyn Beck

Officer Igor Soldo

Of course, Eric Holder is the most powerful person in law enforcement in America while Alex Jones is just a radio talk show host. But both of them are tearing away at the social fabric relating to law enforcement in similar ways.

It is perverse that we have, in Eric Holder, an Attorney General who has repeatedly sided with violent cop-killers and against police. Throughout Holder’s private and public career, he has taken extreme positions against police safety, agitated for the release of cop-killers and terrorists, and even secured the release of terrorist cop killers via Bill Clinton’s presidential pardons. Holder does not oppose the spilling of police blood so long as the cop killer is a leftist; he only cares when he can score political points by accusing anyone and everyone on the right for cop killings committed by fringe, allegedly right-wing types.

Holder also has the power to define the system’s response to crimes, and he is largely responsible (along with Elena Kagan and Bill Clinton back in 1997) for the creation of hate crime laws that make the murders of some types of people more important than the murders of other types of people.

Thanks to Eric Holder, the murders of Las Vegas Police Officers Igor Soldo and Alyn Beck will not be counted as hate crimes because the Department of Justice doesn’t count police as victims of hate. If they did — if they counted as hate crime not only the killings but the assaults, attempted murders, verbal abuse, and other hatred directed generally at police, then police would rank among the most vulnerable hate crime victims in America.

But Holder would never let that stand.

Alex Jones is just a radio talk show host, but he uses his bully pulpit to dehumanize police in other ways: he accuses them of crimes against humanity and of taking part in ornate deceptions of the public through “false flag” events. Though Jones claims that he is really blaming the government and not ordinary police officers for “false flags,” that claim is a lie: he spews rage about police “stormtroopers,” and his websites are festooned with images of cops purportedly responsible for beating and torturing civilians.

Jones tells his listeners that police are guilty of perpetrating atrocities against the American public: he says they are the ones who helped the U.S. government cover-up its role in the terrorist attacks that killed thousands on 9/11. He says they are the ones who murdered the schoolchildren in Sandy Hook, if there were any children murdered at all. He says the police set off the bombs at the Boston marathon, if there were bombs at all and that police were the killers in the Aurora movie theater massacre, if there was a massacre at all. Jones really says these things: every time he calls these massacres “false flag” events what he is saying is that either people didn’t really die or the police are the ones who killed them at the behest of our government.

[P]olice everywhere are paying the price for the anti-cop rhetoric surfacing in political speech and political activism across the political spectrum these days. This anti-cop drumbeat is always the same, whether it comes from the White House or a fringe anti-government website, from libertarian hysterics on the right or criminal rights activists on the left.

In 2009, four Seattle Police were assassinated in cold blood by Maurice Clemmons as they sat in a restaurant in a town near Seattle. Clemmons, a violent career criminal and rapist, had told numerous people of his plans to assassinate police, and after the killings he became a cause celebré among anti-cop leftist activists in Seattle and California. Before the killings, he had been granted leniency by half a dozen judges and also by then-Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has refused to apologize for his role in freeing Clemmons, who went on to rape, brutalize and murder dozens of victims in several states, including these fallen heroes.

Also in 2009, serial rapist Lovelle Mixon became a left-wing counterculture hero for gunning down four police officers in Oakland, California. Occupy protesters and activists from Oakland’s deeply anti-cop culture celebrated Mixon after the murders, just as they have long celebrated Mumia Abu Jamal, another cold-blooded cop killer.

Also in 2009, Richard Poplowski, a white supremacist, murdered three police officers and severely wounded two others during a domestic violence call to his mother’s home. Killed by Poplowski were Officers Paul Sciullo, Eric Kelly, and Stephen Mayhle.

Officer Paul Sciullo

Officer Stephen Mayle

Officer Eric Kelly

In each of these cases and also in the Las Vegas killings yesterday, men with long histories of violence, mental instability, race hatred, substance abuse, and animosity towards law enforcement ambushed or assassinated police officers. But you would not know the similarities in these cases by reading your daily newspaper or even looking up official statistics about police killers: newspapers, taking their cues from leftist organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and Eric Holder’s Justice Department, identify only the right-wing killers as “political” killers of police.

Alex Jones is half-right when he says that he is being singled out for blame for the Las Vegas killings because he is a conservative: he is right that conservative anti-cop agitators get singled out while left-wing agitators don’t get singled out for identical behavior. But the solution isn’t to give Jones a pass: the solution is to blame left-wingers who incite anti-police violence as well.

Left-wing political cop killers like Mumia Abu Jamal and the fugitive serial cop assassin Assata Shakur are celebrated and defended by the New York Times and by professors at our most prestigious universities. They are mooned over by ethical buffoons like Terry Gross of NPR. They are given radio shows on the taxpayer’s dime on NPR to spew their race hatred and hatred of police. NPR and Terry Gross and the New York Times and all the Harvard professors agitating for Mumia and sheltering Assata Shakur deserve the same sort of blame that Alex Jones gets.

That would be fair. Also fair: investigating Eric Holder for bias and fraud whenever he and his favorite propagandists at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League create deceptive “statistics” and “reports” that are no more than bombastic political lying designed to blame the Tea Party for violent acts committed by others.

In addition to perverting the mission of the Justice Department by playing partisan politics, Holder, the SPLC, the ADL and the mainstream media are all missing (or actively suppressing) the real story of a dangerous anti-police movement that gains its power not from the Tea Party (a law-abiding, peaceful movement which has been much maligned) but from an unholy alliance of druggy leftist anarchists, druggy right-wing anarchists, and druggy individuals with no discernible politics who nonetheless feed off the paranoia of sites such as InfoWars on the far right, Critical Resistance on the far left, and Cop-Watch on the fringes of both fringes.

As soon as news of the police murders in Las Vegas broke, Alex Jones went on the air and predictably declared the event a “false flag” designed by the government to discredit . . . Alex Jones. The SPLC’s Mark Potok hit the news circuit with his own false flag, trying to tar the Tea Party with the actions of the Vegas killers despite the fact that killers Jerad and Amanda Miller were kicked out of the only patriot citizen event (at the Cliven Bundy ranch) they were known to have attended (and even the Bundy ranch standoff was not widely endorsed by Tea Party activists). CNN shamelessly regurgitated Mark Potok’s line, reporting that the Millers had been seen at the Bundy Ranch but leaving out the fact that the Bundy family made them leave. On his radio show, Alex Jones shamelessly ranted for hours about how he was the real victim of the Vegas shootings. In coming weeks, Eric Holder will doubtlessly use the shootings to ramp up the Department of Justice’s scrutiny of Tea Party groups and military veterans (though the Millers were neither veterans nor members of any known Tea Party).

Not the Tea Party

To Eric Holder, cop killers present opportunities for cold-blooded political calculation; to InfoWars’ Alex Jones, they represent an opportunity to grow audience share by egging on viewers to believe they are being persecuted by a”military-industrial police state.” As I wrote in 2011, it takes a village to kill a cop. The village invented by these two ideologues is a very ugly place to be.

Bernadine Dohrn in December 1969, joking about the Manson family murder of Sharon Tate:

Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in pig Tate’s belly. Wild! Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson!

Barack Obama in October 2012, joking about O.J. Simpson’s attempt to flee justice after murdering his wife Nicole:

“You didn’t know this, but for all you moms and kids out there, you should have confidence that finally somebody is cracking down on Big Bird,” Obama said, alluding to the famous O.J. Simpson chase scene. “Elmo has been seen in a white Suburban. He’s driving for the border.”

Sharon Tate’s blood on her living room wall

Nicole Simpson’s blood on her backyard walkway

Who jokes about things like this?

Sharon Tate was nearly nine months pregnant at the time she was killed. She had been stripped and tortured before death, a rope strung around her neck and hung from a beam. She begged the killers to temporarily spare her life, kidnap her, and let her deliver her baby before they killed her. They laughed and killed her anyway. She was buried with the body of her deceased son cradled in her arms.

After Tex Watson stabbed Tate to death, Susan Atkins stuck her finger in Tate’s wounds and wrote the word “pig” on a wall with her blood, an act that delighted Bernadine Dohrn when she heard about it. Dohrn and other Weathermen adopted a four-fingered “fork” salute to signify the act of stabbing Tate in her pregnant stomach.

Bernadine Dohrn at the infamous Flint War Council, where she praised Sharon Tate’s killers

Still not funny: Dohrn, now a “Children’s Rights Law Professor,” smiling with her FBI Most Wanted poster

The 1969 Manson murders (five dead at Tate’s house, two more victims the next night) were intended to start a “race war” between blacks and whites. Ringleader Charles Manson hoped that pinning the brutal crimes on black radicals would anger whites enough to foment all-out war between the races. Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers shared Manson’s vision of an America where blacks wreaked bloody vengeance on white society. Dohrn’s “fork salute” was a celebration of such imagined violence: a proxy race war acted out by white hippies on a pregnant white woman’s body in the name of “civil rights.”

O.J. Simpson celebrates his wrongful acquittal

Twenty-five years later, the acquittal of O.J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman was similarly celebrated. Remember where you were? Was anybody cheering? Why were they cheering?

Ronald Goldman’s father and sister, stunned after the acquittal

The acquittal of O.J. Simpson was viewed by many on the Left as a sort of transhistorical balancing of the ledger, despite the warping of the scales of justice needed to achieve it. Pick a body — pick two bodies — string them up, then give a get-out-of-jail-free card to the killer because of his race. If the Southern Poverty Law Center had any honor, they would record O.J.’s acquittal as a hate crime alongside old cases of Klansmen who avoided prison for similar crimes. It was a moment of deep division for the American people and a source of glee only for those who take pleasure in sowing such divisions. There was nothing funny about it, just as no sane human being would find anything funny about sticking a fork into Sharon Tate’s pregnant stomach.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, proudly reminiscing about their days “underground” to a groveling reporter

Calif. Parole Board OKs Manson Follower’s Release

LOS ANGELES October 5, 2012 (AP) A parole board panel has recommended the release of a former Charles Manson follower imprisoned for 40 years for a double murder Manson engineered, but it’s not the last hurdle Bruce Davis will face as he seeks his freedom.

Bruce Davis: helped slaughter two people in 1969, but he did take classes in prison

Davis has been recommended for parole before. Then-Governor Schwarzenegger rejected the recommendation. Governor Jerry Brown will likely be making a similar decision very soon. The last time Davis was recommended for parole, the California Parole Board argued that he deserved to be free because “he had no recent disciplinary problems and had completed education and self-help programs.”

According to his lawyer, Davis is also an unusually exemplary person who ministers to fellow prisoners and possesses special insight and so on. They all do. Prisons are filled with magical, entirely misunderstood people: it’s like a cross between Sound of Music and The Green Mile in there:

Davis became a born-again Christian in prison and ministered to other inmates, married a woman he met through the prison ministry, and has a grown daughter. The couple recently divorced . . . Davis also earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in philosophy of religion.

Well that’s nice. He also helped torture two men to death. But, meh. Bygones. The last thing the parole board wants to do is dig up the past:

“While your behavior was atrocious, your crimes did occur 43 years ago,” parole board member Jeff Ferguson told Davis, according to the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

Elsewhere, in that unfortunately named thing called The Washington Monthly, the blog boards are incandescent with the thought that we would be so crude as a people to even imagine incarcerating anyone for life, particularly for the crime of merely torturing and killing two lesser-known, non-movie-stars. One commenter offered the following justification for releasing Davis:

[He] didn’t participate in the more sensationalistic murders but rather only those of musician Gary Hinman and the caretaker at the Spahn Ranch, Donald Shea.

You know. B-listers.

I’ve been predicting this day for years: now that the Left has priced the death penalty out of existence, their new, all hands on deck mission will be to eliminate Life Without Parole. It is already presumed, in many circles, that believing in life sentences is a worse crime than murder itself. Soon, the only way to end up behind bars will be to recommend sending people like Bernadine Dohrn or Charles Manson there.

The Republican Convention in Tampa is only a few weeks away. The Occupy movement seems to be missing in action or washing their socks, but other activists are still preparing to disrupt the convention. Teamsters, Welfare Rights groups, “Graduate Assistant” coalitions, the ‘new SDS’ and coalitions of subsidized professional agitators such as the Committee to Stop FBI Repression are making plans to descend on Tampa.

Last month, these activists used the taxpayer-funded facilities of the University of South Florida to plan their attack. Why did USF President Judy Genshaft allow our property to be used by a bunch of radicals who are openly planning to disrupt an important political event and violate the speech and participation rights of ordinary Americans?

About 50 people from across the country gathered here June 16, on the University of South Florida campus, for the Coalition to March on the Republican National Convention Organizers Conference. There were representatives from more than 30 labor unions, student organizations, anti-war groups and immigrant rights groups from Florida, Minnesota, Illinois and North Carolina, including the Graduate Assistants United at the University of Florida, Students for a Democratic Society, the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, the United National Anti War Coalition, and Students Working for Equal Rights.

The conference focused on reaching out to groups and organizations opposed to the Republican agenda, in order to bring them to Tampa for the march. . .

Marisol Marquez and Fernando Figueroa, two of the lead Florida organizers for the Coalition to March on the RNC, facilitated a full schedule of workshops and planning sessions aimed at building for the march on August 27, the first day of the convention.

“The Coalition to March on the RNC is a group effort, in every sense of the word,” said Figueroa. “We’re hosting this conference so all of our coalition partners – workers, students, immigrants, and others – can build for this historic march in August behind a unified message and a cohesive organizing strategy.”

Mick Kelly, an organizer of the massive protest at the 2008 Republican Convention urged an all out national mobilization for the opening day of the RNC. Joe Iosbaker, a key organizer of May’s NATO Summit protest, summed up the key lessons of the Chicago demonstration. Tracy Molm of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression noted that the government would work to derail the planned protest. Angel Buechner, of the Twin Cites based Welfare Rights Committee stated that low-income people would join the Coalition’s march. . .

[O]n Friday, July 27, coalition partners will hold demonstrations, pickets and protests outside of local Republican Party headquarters or corporate sponsors of the Convention.

“The city of Tampa insists on restricting our right to protest the agenda of the Republican Party,” said Richard Blake, a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 385 and organizer with the Coalition to March on the RNC. “

Aww, the Teamsters feel “silenced.” When did the Teamsters start channeling an Oprah audience? Jimmy Hoffa must be squirming in his grave, wherever that is.

Unfortunately, some city officials in Tampa Bay have been caving to the protesters and granting them special access to elected officials, access not available to the real residents who pay public officials’ salaries and foot the city’s bills.

Occupy Protesters are also coalitioning with the radical Food Not Bombs to protest the RNC. Food Not Bombs is a group that ought to be watched closely: they operate as a front group, using the excuse that they’re “feeding vegan meals to the homeless” while they set up camps that serve as cover for radical activists. FNB is packing up their seitan snacks and heading to Tampa Bay. Don’t let the happy faces fool you:

Here is an interesting blog post from one local activist trying (and not exactly succeeding) to get involved in the “real” protest planning:

[D]elegations from St. Pete, Lakeland, Sarasota, Bradenton, and Tampa converged on Lykes Gaslight Park in downtown Tampa [June 4]. Occupy Tampa had felt a need to do some planning for the Republican National Convention (RNC) . . . So far, I know of Resist The RNC, Occupy The RNC, and March On The RNC, along with the official RNC itself. Within minutes of arriving at the Regional Gathering, I had gathered that although these separate groups are each coordinating strategy, tactics, and logistics for the RNC, they may not be coordinating with each other. And, at the moment, they are tight-lipped about their plans.

The activist writing this must not be not a member of the “in” group of radical protesters. Interesting that the activists in charge are keeping such a tight lock-down on their real plans, concealing things from other activists who are trying to get involved in their events. The blogger continues:

Upon our arrival, Food Not Bombs was on the scene serving a vegan lunch to all attendees. In Sarasota, the thoughtful Food Not Bombs crew has served the hungry during a number of the weekly Occupy rallies. I recognized Katie, who had been active with Occupy Tampa and is now volunteering with Food Not Bombs. I have met many people for whom the Occupy Movement has been a conduit, connecting their sense of injustice and disillusionment with a local activist group that stirs their passion. Like the Occupy Movement, Food Not Bombs is composed of volunteers who are dedicated to nonviolent, societal change. Like Occupy, each local group is autonomous. Like Occupy, there are no leaders and they involve everybody in the decision-making process. And like Occupy, Food Not Bombs supports protests organized by others. With that in mind, it is no surprise that they have decided to have an international convention in Tampa, during the week leading up to the RNC. Undoubtedly, there will be many more groups calling for a national march on the RNC.

Bull. Food Not Bombs is actually planning a pre-RNC invasion, starting August 20. They’re calling it VEGANPALOOZA, and it has nothing to do with really “feeding the poor.” Instead, it will enable FNB to establish camps throughout Tampa and refuse to leave while glomming attention from partisan, naive, or headline-hungry media types. And what happens when they refuse to stay inside the protest zones meticulously planned by the ACLU and Tampa government?

What, exactly, will happen with all that nice, friendly, egalitarian and inclusive “protest planning” being showered on the activists by our City Council? The protesters will ignore it, like they do at every event where city officials give them an inch — or a mile. It’s not about “free speech.” It’s about disrupting an actually free and peaceful gathering — the Republican National Convention.

The Tampa City Council is setting itself up as a pasty. They’re bending over backwards to please the ACLU and the National Lawyer’s Guild, as those groups act in bad faith with the city. Of court they’re being abetted in this by the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Times).

It’s a vegan-based recipe for disaster. Somebody in City Hall needs to remember who they really work for and start asking some hard questions about the deceptive tactics and “spontaneous” disruptions being planned by Food not Bombs and their peers.

The outsider-blogger continues:

I was not fully aware of the depth of activity nearby. Occupy Tampa is producing a TV show. Occupy Daytona has started a radio show. Occupy Tampa is starting a street theatre group. The OccupPlayers from Bradenton, who performed at the WSLR radio station in Sarasota a couple of months ago, is planning a performance in St. Pete and will make themselves available as requested by other locations. And for those holdouts who still like to read, there is an Occupied Tampa Tribune.

The General Assembly whipped through a number of proposals. All attained consensus, but one. The Tampa Region stands in solidarity with the student protesters in Quebec. The Tampa Region will hold a General Assembly at different locations, every two weeks, until the RNC. A most interesting proposal was brought forward to put out a National Call To Action Against Bain Capital. The actions would take place all over the country on the day Mitt Romney accepts the Republican presidential nomination. There is something almost romantic about this idea. Romney continues to receive a passive profit share and interest in Bain Capital investment funds. Bain Capital always made a profit even when the companies they bought went under, even when many workers lost their jobs, their pensions, and their healthcare. Such vulture capitalism is the poster child for what’s wrong with how our economic system functions. What better time to highlight these cold deficiencies than on the day of Romney’s acceptance speech.

A recurring concern voiced at the Gathering was dwindling participation. Leslie from Occupy Tampa was curious and concerned about attendance at other Occupations. A local religious leader made a plea for presenting a clear and constant message about the profound issues of economic inequality. He is hoping for a format that will draw people in and get them involved. Jason, who is from Tallahasse but has been staying with Occupy Tampa for the last month, threw out a concrete suggestion to the General Assembly. How about renting a truck, covering it with sheets, projecting messages onto it, and driving through Ybor City on a Friday night. Go to where the people are and make a bold statement. Leslie volunteered to coordinate outreach efforts to help bring more people out to participate.

Soon after the General Assembly came to a close, folks made signs and marched around downtown in solidarity with the Quebec students. Students there had called for a tuition freeze. Nightly protests consisted of clanging noisy pots and pans in the streets. The students wore red felt squares to symbolize being financially in the red, crushed by debt. In Canada, as in the United States, tuition hikes are leading to increasing student debt. Even after almost 100 nights of protest, the students hadn’t garnered much community support. But, when the government passed emergency legislation to limit students’ right to assemble and protest, thousands of community members flooded the streets in support. As I understand it, the strike by the Quebec students is the longest and largest student protest in Canadian history. And yet their debt is small potatoes when compared with the $1 trillion in debt taken on by college students in the United States. In addition to marching in solidarity with Quebec students, folks here are motivated by the spiraling student debt in the United States. A jubilant procession from the Tampa Regional Gathering marched through downtown, banging pots and pans and wearing red felt squares.

Oh yeah. And possibly doing this.

Welcome to Tampa, kiddies. It’s going to hot in those balaclavas, though:

I previously wrote about what is coming to Tampa, here. In upcoming weeks I will detail the ways some elected officials are selling us out to the protesters. Meanwhile, it’s time to send the city a polite but firm message: we don’t want to have to pay for anti-social radicals to have air-conditioned public facilities to plan their attack on the city.

We’re already paying enough, getting ready to prevent them from causing chaos in the street — or worse. And why should we have to pay for this? Why aren’t the groups listed above being sent the bill?

Last year, a tedious brew of Occupy protesters and “Cop-Watch” activists took to the streets in Rochester, New York. They mobilized behind a contemporary flower-child named Emily Good. Good had been detained briefly after interfering in a police stop that occurred outside her urban hipster-neighborhood home.

After the actual subjects of the police stop slunked into the night, never to be heard from again (and doubtlessly grateful that Good’s hysterics had distracted the police), Good and her supporters tried to make hay out of her arrest. She granted interviews to CNN and posed for pictures “doing ministry work” in a drop-waist dress, all the while denouncing the “horrors of police brutality” on Rochester’s violent streets.

Good on CNN

But it soon emerged that Good was not the earnest-random-citizen-witness-to-alleged-police-brutality she pretended to be. Video showing her physically attacking an Olympic torch runner in Canada and feigning abuse at the hands of police during a violent squatter’s protest revealed her real identity as a professional anti-policing activist — one trained to incite and escalate conflicts with the police. Luckily, the videos of Good’s prior activities were saved by a smart local blogger before Good and her supporters cleansed her Facebook page of evidence of her radical activities.

Good Pretending to Be Brutalized By Police

The Olympic torch video was particularly chilling. Good and other “native Canadian rights” activists knocked down the woman runner, who was nearly ignited in flames from falling on the torch. Rather than being chastened by the near-disaster, Good bragged about it online, gleeful that she had interrupted the “Gestapo” Olympic torch run. She wrote:

The runner actually tripped over all of her security people who were frantically shoving us out of the way. Anyway, the torch went down! Hitler started that tradition for the nazi olympics — time to extinguish it!

What sort of person jokes about nearly setting another human on fire? More importantly, who does such a thing while simultaneously believing she is on the side of angels, who sees herself not as a violent person but as a social heroine, feeding the poor and spreading justice to the dispossessed? It is to our detriment that we have forgotten about the lost girls of the Seventies, those college-educated daughters turned glassy-eyed cultists who flocked to Charles Manson, shot at presidents, or blew themselves up wiring bombs in their daddies’ townhouses.

John Updike’s story, “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd,” says something about the starting point of this sort of social disintegration. Not precisely, but read it anyway.

Good and her compatriots were protesting the “imperial” Canadian state and the evil corporations hosting the Olympics. That justified almost setting an innocent woman on fire.

In the mindset of activists like these, anybody who does not agree with their politics is an expendable dupe, and the police are no less than the Gestapo.

Emily Good with Hugo Chavez: Just Another Young Woman Who Cares About Justice

Bread Not Bombs

Emily Good is a member of the radical activist group Food not Bombs. Good even wore a Food Not Bombs t-shirt to one television interview in which she denied that she had ever been involved in anti-police activism. “I have never agitated directly against the police . . . I wouldn’t say I’m an activist against the police at all,” she told the reporter, while wearing a t-shirt for an organization that agitates against police.

In recent years, Food Not Bombs Rochester has hosted events such as: “Open Mic Against Police Brutality and State Repression” and “Support the Police: Beat Yourself Up.” The reporter didn’t ask Good about her t-shirt during the interview: the media has utterly failed to report credibly on the war on cops being waged by radicals ranging from activists like Good to national lawyer’s groups subsidized by billionaire financier George Soros.

Tampa, beware: the Emily Good story — the media’s epic failure to identify her, or to report on Food Not Bombs’ radical motives and training — is a cautionary tale for the city of Tampa, which is preparing to host the 2012 Republican Convention. Food Not Bombs is planning to arrive in the city in advance of the convention and set up so-called “feeding stations” providing “vegan food for the homeless.” These encampments will serve as cover for other radicals. The local media is taking its marching orders from the A.C.L.U. instead of investigating Food Not Bombs’ tactics. So the public remains uninformed, while elected officials pander to the professional activist classes instead of asking hard questions of the protestors, let alone holding them responsible for the trespassing and code violations they have committed so far.

Nothing to See Here: Good Denies Anti-Police Activities While Wearing an Anti-Police T-Shirt

The media’s failure to notice Good’s shirt would have merely been funny if the stakes weren’t so high. Cities like Rochester are contending with exploding crime rates, while police budgets are gutted and police find themselves are under attack.

Rochester has been living through a 40% increase in homicides and a 73% increase in shootings. Nevertheless, the A.C.L.U. keeps encouraging the public to resist all crime-fighting measures. Through an initiative subsidized and orchestrated by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, A.C.L.U. activists advertise free phone apps that teach people to videotape police and interfere in crime fighting. Meanwhile, Rochester burns. Little wonder that people in high crime areas are less enthusiastic about A.C.L.U. lawsuits and anti-cop street-marches than the dilettantes who pack up after marching picket lines and return to nicer houses and safer neighborhoods.

Still, silly as they seem, there’s no underestimating the damage such people can do.

Last year, Emily Good and her trumped-up “persecution” cost the police time and money that could have been spent fighting real crime. It also tied their hands, as activists descended on Rochester to take advantage of Good’s fifteen minutes of embarrasingly-non-vetted media fame. Even now, as the murders and shootings pile up, the A.C.L.U. keeps playing by the script, accusing police of brutality no matter what they do to try to quell the crime wave. But some residents are speaking out in support of stepped-up police protection. Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Columnist Jermayne Myers recently wrote:

Kudos to Rochester Police Chief James Sheppard and the police department for shifting into over gear to help curb a recent spike in shooting, stabbings, robberies, homicides and other senseless acts of violence and crime in the City.

As I’ve said in the past, our city and its residents have been held hostage by the numerous senseless acts of violence and crime over the past two-three months. With 21 homicides and 95 gun assaults, and still counting as of last week, Rochester is on the path to seeing one of its worse and most violent summers.

One recent tool to help combat this rash of violence and crime is operation “Cool Down”. According to Sheppard, during operation “Cool Down”, additional officers will be highly visible, and engaging people on the street to prevent crime rather than reacting to its aftermath.

I commend and respect Sheppard for not being scared to use these tactics to target and make those that commit crime and violence in the city feel uncomfortable walking or riding around our streets, neighborhoods and communities.

As a young African-American man living in the city, I endorse these tactics (when used correctly) to help reduce violence, crime, homicides and keep our city safe.

I’m sick and tired of hearing about someone else getting shot, stabbed and/or killed on our city streets, and sadly both the victim and perpetrator are young African-American men. If you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. Just cooperate with police, thank them for doing their job and keep it moving.

This sort of attitude is anathema to the Emily Good and A.C.L.U. lawyers. Of course, they don’t spend their nights worrying about their families’ safety or hauling bleeding young men to emergency rooms. As Rochester mayor Tom Richards wryly observed, in response to a predictable media question about the civil rights implications of stepped-up police patrols:

When News10NBC informed her of the police department’s “Cool Down Detail,” [Doreen Brown] was thrilled. “I would be very proud for that to happen. We care about out neighborhood, we care about our neighbors and we would love to have more patrols around here there is too much violence.”

Brown said, “We have people that are terrified terrified. We try to stay together to keep peace. We don’t want it to seem like we just a bad neighborhood with crime, but if we don’t have help from the police, what are we to do?”

While the Tampa City Council and camera-hungry Mayor Bob Buckhorn eagerly grandstand (with the aid of the MSM, of course) about the non-issue of legally registered gun-owners having their weapons with them during the Republican National Convention, take a good look at the types of problems they’re refusing to confront: violent Occupy/black bloc/anarchist thugs destroying businesses in Seattle Tuesday — and sure to be on their way to Tampa for the Republican Convention in August:

Watch the video here. It’s disturbing. (someday, I’ll learn to imbed YouTube videos as well as the average 8-year old): wYT82Fec3cQ

Where, you might ask, are the Seattle police? Well, spineless Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn probably reined them in, afraid that any response to these destructive thugs would turn into accusations of “police brutality” and the inevitable lawsuits. At 2:23 in the video, the police show up . . . on bicycles. How would you like that to be your son or daughter, wading into a hostile, club-wielding mob on a bicycle because the mayor wants to placate . . . the hostile, club-wielding mob?

Seattle Mayor McGinn. Don’t bother shaving or anything, dude.

So businesspeople trying to make a living in Seattle are left to the mercy of the mob while the Mayor placates the looters. Note the number of businesses that already have plexiglass or covered windows because of previous riots. Taxpayers who pay extra to have storefronts in downtown Seattle? Screw ‘em. Elected officials there have decided it’s worth risking the lives of their police and the safety of their citizens and the profitability of their business class — all to score brownie points with a bunch of inarticulate, screaming animals who will not only not be placated, but will be empowered by the Mayor’s impotent “gesture.”

Of course, Mayor McGinn gets a taxpayer-funded security detail. The employees at that Niketown store being mobbed by thugs? Not so much. And when the store closes because its evil corporate overlords decide that it’s just not worth doing business in a place where elected officials privilege thugs over decent, ordinary citizens and businesspeople, those employees won’t have jobs, either.

I have a lot of faith in the Tampa and Hillsborough County police forces, and in the Chief of Police and the Sheriff. But Mayor Buckhorn and some members of the Tampa City Council are beclowning themselves — on our dime — with hysteria over registered guns and other non-issues, while pandering to the wishes of the ACLU, which apparently has a direct line to the Mayor that ordinary, taxpaying citizens lack:

City officials met last week with the American Civil Liberties Union about “an exhaustive list of things” the ACLU thinks impinge on protesters’ First Amendment rights, said Joyce Hamilton Henry, director of the ACLU’s Tampa office. “The city was very receptive,” Hamilton Henry said.

How nice. Now it’s time for Mayor Buckhorn to stop playing games and get serious.

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn. On a Segway. What is it with Mayors and Segways?

~~~~

Because, these people . . .

. . . are coming to Tampa for the Convention. And if I owned a business in the protest zone and had to shut down for a week, or shell out money for new windows, or security guards, or worry about my employees getting to and from their cars — I’d be mightily pissed off watching Mayor Buckhorn preen for the national press over his registered-guns hobbyhorse. I’m outside the city limits, and believe me, Bob, such feelings — and business interests — don’t stop at the train tracks.

Speaking of pissed, here’s the reason they’re banning squirt-guns at the convention:

This is part or the whole of an extensive stash of bottles recovered in the 010th District the other day. All filled with human waste and no doubt whatever extra fecal matter the ne’er-do-wells were able to pick up on the parkways. Counts range from 100 to 500 bottles recovered depending on the rumor you believe. We’re sure this isn’t the only stash floating around out there. How about the Department try something novel and get the media to cover what the protestors and anarchists are planning and maybe get the public overwhelmingly on our side?

Good question, as usual, from SCC. Someone should ask Tampa Mayor Buckhorn the same. He could have gotten behind his city’s police officers, and gotten out in front of this, and explained the squirt-gun ban to the public, but that might have cut into his gold-plated national media tantrum. So he said this, instead, and his pals at the Tampa Times let him get away with it. Without, like, asking any hard questions:

“The absurdity of banning squirt guns but not being able to do anything about real guns is patently obvious,” Buckhorn said.

In other words, why behave responsibly when you can glom a few moments scoring political points on the national news — after all, what’s a few cops being doused with urine and feces (and urine mixed with bleach, and battery acid, and other silly protester stuff?)

By the way, the allegedly peaceful Tampa Coalition to March on the RNC has already issued a declaration that they stand by “diversity of tactics.” This means, specifically, that they are rolling out the welcome mat for black bloc/anarchist and other violent protest.

So, did the mayor ask any questions about this the last time he chummily confabbed with the protesters’ lawyers at the ACLU?

Did anyone in the media bother to ask him why not?

Nope. They were too busy featuring giggly thingies like this, who think it’s hilarious to mock security efforts designed to keep all of us safe — conventioneers, protesters, business owners, but most especially the police, who will be the ones dealing with the thugs — that is, when they aren’t busy arresting this woman again, when she probably ought to be at her desk at work — working for the taxpayers who employ her, that is . . .

So long as Mayor Buckhorn and his echo chamber at the Tampa Bay (formerly St. Pete) Times keep attacking law-abiding gun owners instead of the anarchists and Food-not-Bombs lunatics and their black bloc “diversity of tactics” peers, our brave cops can expect to be soaked with human waste; business owners can expect to be cleaning up broken glass and laying off workers, and the rest of us can expect to be footing the bill for the mayor’s pre-emptive lack of spine. As a taxpayer, I keep expecting something something different. But I know that’s just a personality flaw.

With enough clichés to fill a file cabinet labeled Boy’s Town, the Order of St. Duranty of the prefecture of 8th Avenue absolved another preening terrorist last week. And, look! It’s yet another radical chicklet involved in yet another Brinks Robbery. I’m sorry, I mean Father Radical Chic, the Reverend Patrick Moloney, who still thinks it’s extremely funny that some poor innocent Brinks guards suffered the hell of guns held to their temples. Moloney got to wallow in a big pile of money before getting caught and serving a few token years.

Yon Patrick: you don’t hold a gun to the temple of an innocent and then change the location of the money, you chase the money changers out of the . . . oh, never mind.

Moloney was given a slap on the wrist. Why, I wonder. I guess “who” is actually the cogent question. Dead . . . Kennedys? The Reverend does not regret his involvement. Rather, he gleefully admits he dines out on it. Nor has it harmed his career. Nice. Then consider this blog post my contribution to Catholic Charities this year, ‘kay?

Praying for Murdered Brinks’ Employees?

Before, during, and after Moloney served time, he was lavished with impressively selective Times profiles praising his commitment to “causes.” He was thus given a platform to claim he was a political prisoner; to claim that the U.S. was using his faith to punish and essentially torture him, and to promote himself as a hero of conscience on the grounds that he wouldn’t cooperate in defending himself because he was protecting illegal immigrants.

Except, he had defended himself. And none of the rest of it was even slightly believable.

I believe in believing people when they say they hate you and accuse you of wrongdoing. The accusations Moloney levied against our justice system and Italians in particular and Americans in general should have banished him from decent society, not burnished his caché. If such things matter, falsely accusing the American public of persecution for being a priest ought to mean something, not mean nothing. And if false accusations matter so much, why is it that they don’t matter at all when they’re directed at certain people, like Italians, or Americans, or the prosecutors who did a fine job proving their case?

Instead of correcting the record, the Times buries it while swooning about Moloney in creepy fake brogue:

AH, now here comes Father Moloney, ambling down East Ninth Street in his priest’s outfit, a crucifix on a heavy chain around his neck.

This cuddly 80-year-old priest with the Limerick lilt doesn’t exactly look like “the underground general” of Irish Republican Army gun runners, as one British intelligence officer pronounced him in 1982.

“That’s what he called me,” said the Rev. Patrick Moloney, chuckling . . .

Har, har. Funny stuff, written by the doubtlessly entirely objective Corey Kilgannon: after all, who couldn’t trust someone who calls a terrorist “cuddly”? So why was Mr. Moloney — thugs do not deserve honorariums, especially when they use them to terrorize innocents — really arrested in Ireland, Corey? Oh, never mind. Let’s get on to the stateside sadism:

He sank into a sofa, leafed through his mail and launched into another story, this one about serving four years in federal prison in the 1990s in connection with a $7.4 million Brink’s armored car robbery in Rochester — at the time, called the fifth biggest Brink’s robbery in history — which authorities said he helped pull off to fill I.R.A. coffers.

Isn’t it weird how at the paper of record, killing or at least threatening to kill Brinks employees is sort of the equivalent of turning wine into water? Judith Clark helped off a couple of cops and Brinks guards in 1981 and even though one of the cops turned out inconveniently to be black while dying, she still qualified for the Times’ beatification beat 3 months ago. Now it’s Moloney’s turn:

Father Moloney, a slight man with a short gray beard and glasses, emigrated from Ireland in 1955 and, inspired by the Catholic activist and anarchist Dorothy Day, began his ministry for the poor in the blighted East Village. He battled the gang leaders and drug dealers as ferociously as he now fights the developer-gentrifiers.

Gibbons went missing in August of 1995 after he told a friend he was driving to Rochester to get his cut of the [Brinks robbery] millions. Greece [N.Y.] Police say while this began as a missing persons case, that changed after body parts were found in Jefferson County in 1999 and 2000. Those remains were just recently identified using DNA. The Medical Examiner in Onondaga County found that the remains were those of Gibbons and that this was a homicide.

You see, after the Brinks robbery, the money not found in Father Pat’s pockets went missing. And then this guy decides he wants his cut of it, and he goes to get it in 1995 and ends up hacked to pieces like some extra in the Sopranos. But you can’t blame this one on my people (though Moloney tried to do so): this is the IRA and its sleazy apologists at the Times, who somehow never manage to get around to mentioning Moloney’s very recently identified, long-missing pal, or the December I.D.’ing of the body parts scattered all over upstate New York, what with all the column inches they have to dedicate to smiling Irish eyes and cups o’ tea and pretending that sheltering terrorists isn’t a federal offense.

Here’s the Times’ entire statement on the missing millions. They calls this reporting. In Gaelic, though, it is colorfully known as a lieae:

While Father Moloney was in federal prison — he called himself a political prisoner — “Free Father Pat” graffiti was scrawled around the East Village [of course it was]. The remaining $5.2 million in Brinks money was never found. Certainly Father Moloney never showed signs of getting richer. He has lived like a monk, sleeping in a closet-size room on a cot stretched over his filing cabinets.

Meanwhile, Ronnie Gibbons sleeps with the potatoes. Can’t the people at the Times at least pretend to stop stroking terrorists? Didn’t they watch the towers fall? Has anyone they love ever had a pistol held to their skull?

Is this stuff really just an opportunity to mock normal people?

It is to Moloney:

Father Moloney . . . used the Brinks publicity for his causes and never missed a chance to gleefully snub the authorities about it. “I rubbed the government’s nose in it,” he said, and he poured himself a cup of Irish tea.

Of course. Of course the whole hacked-up bodies, gun-to-temples, supporting terrorists, blarney clap-trap parade gets ignored by the people who are supposed to offer moral guidance or enforce immigration rules . . . so what does the Church do to stop this blight on their honor from continuing to spit in the face of the cops and security guards kneeling in the pews? What does immigration do about what they haven’t ever done about this treasonous thug, who admits to other crimes, which he calls not-crimes, which doesn’t mean they weren’t, just that the Times won’t ask for anyone else to weigh in for, like, accuracy:

He has defended and hidden fugitives, the undocumented and I.R.A. members on the lam. The list includes relatives of both Gerry Adams and Malcolm X, he said. They have stayed in the secret apartments he has kept around the city for this purpose, some of them in public housing. “I have never broken a law, but I have circumvented most of them,” he said, fingering his ever-present prayer beads, a mischievous glint in his eye.

In a YouTube video, Moloney’s got some strange stories about living posh and the usual vague claims about racists burning down his stuff, which drew him approbation and likely big funding –funny, how unsolved fires and unsubstantiated accusations so frequently turn into cha-ching for America-hating faux humanists.

I also wonder how many of the people who gave him cash knew about the $2 million in extracurricular Brinks fundraising found in his safe, or the “foot found on Lake Ontario,” the “partially clad torso” in Cape Vincent, or the gym shorts of said torso tied to the New York Athletic Club and now confirmed to be associated with the disappearance of the robbery money not found in Molony’s possession.

Moloney “[s]ays proudly that he worked with Robert Collier and other Black Panthers, and that he met with Yasser Arafat,” though the Times plays a bit coy with that last bit. I wonder if he’s won any awards from PEN yet. Probably has to raise his body count first.

Or, start rhyming.

~~~

Patrick Moloney tried to get a pardon from President Clinton in 1998. It didn’t work out. But it’s pretty clear the New York Times has just added him to their recent pin-ups for pardons. Grounds for inclusion appear to consist primarily of loathing America, succoring terrorists, and/or just being one.

Occupy Protesters are laying the groundwork to create chaos in Tampa during the Republican National Convention in August.

Tampa residents need to be aware of the ways these professional activists are costing us money. Frivolous confrontations and false accusations against the police are just the first items on the price tag for their planned temper tantrum. I hope the city and the county show the gumption to send the bill to these activists. The Occupiers are raising plenty of money: the fact that they’re keeping their books like some money-laundering pizzaria shouldn’t let them off the dough hook (I can say this because I once worked at a money-laundering pizzaria). Elected officials owe it to taxpayers to sue the non-profit entities through which these protesters are collecting donations.

In Tampa, the first wasteful Occupy courtroom confrontation involves activists Alicia Dion and Kevin Flynn. Flynn and Dion claim that they weren’t given “adequate notice” before being removed from a park where they were trespassing, and they also claim that the signs stating park hours weren’t clear to them.

Essentially, their legal argument boils down to insisting that they are irresponsible and incompetent. Their defense to a trespassing charge is that they’re not good at understanding time or reading signage.

I’ll give them that. It’s actually a perfect expression of the types of complaints fueling the Occupy Movement. Any parent of a two-year old knows this look:

Dion and Flynn: Watch out, here comes the howling!

But there’s a less funny side to the antics of the professional activist class. Two deliberate strategies guide this and all other Occupy actions:

take public land and claim it for private use

persecute the police

Dion and Flynn were part of a planned assault on the taxpayers of Hillsborough County and false accusations against the police. They lied in court when they said they didn’t have adequate notice for clearing out of the park, and they lied about the police’s actions:

Dion and her boyfriend, Kevin Flynn, 33, were among a small group of Occupy Tampa protesters who tested the city prohibition on Nov. 7. City parks are closed from sunset to sunrise, except during special events. At midnight, the protesters refused three warnings from police to leave the park. Police said the warnings took about a minute.

Get it? They didn’t “not know” or “not receive warning.” They carefully orchestrated a confrontation, and then they lied about it in court.

Those lies matter, particularly the ones about the police, because they serve as justification for all the acts of violence and abuse perpetrated by Occupy protesters against the police. Make no mistake about it: they are trying to use the courts, right now, to lay the groundwork for chaos and lawsuits later.

Tampa residents need to educate themselves about Occupy tactics, call their representatives, and make sure we’re not left paying the tab for these goons:

There’s something very disturbing about adults behaving like babies, and throwing tantrums on the street, and lying in court, and claiming persecution, persecution, persecution when they are the real persecutors. We should be disturbed and remember that the police represent our interests. They are us; they’re the ones putting themselves between us and the protesters, who have bad intentions and are lying about that, too.

On the bright side, the Republican National Convention is going to be held in Florida in Late August. The 99% that actually matters will probably be 99 degrees with 99% humidity. Fox News might have to set up watering stations for the protesters out of sheer compassion . . . or Mother Nature may be the one clearing the streets.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s always nice to see this disturbed hate-clown get even a little piece of what he deserves:

But Sharpton’s distaff comments about gays are not quite the right focus for the current scandal over Rush Linbaugh calling women s***s, Bill Maher calling women c***s, NPR comic Marc Maron wishing violent rape on Michelle Bachmann, or various other public figures and human rights activists dropping b-bombs and other slurs on women (note: by “various other public figures and human rights activists,” I mean every gay male political activist I’ve ever known, several well-placed professional lesbians, Salon’s entire “sex-positive” girl-staff, and the earth-shoe-wearing-man-heroes of the liberal Left).

Too few of the writers objecting to Sharpton’s play-doh-like transformation into cultural decency arbiter on MSNBC are recalling his really relevant slurs — the ones against the Central Park Jogger.

Sharpton and his sidekick Alton Maddox assembled and egged on protesters who called the jogger a “whore” and called her attorney “bitch,” “white devil,” “witch,” and “slut.” He announced that he didn’t believe that she was actually raped or beaten into a coma. Sickeningly, he demanded that she be examined by a psychiatrist and accused her boyfriend of being “the real” rapist. He tried to incite violence against her, nearly succeeding, just as he threatened violence against the Pagones family after orchestrating Tawana Brawley’s false rape accusation against Steve Pagones. Thanks to the racial hatred stirred up by Sharpton, the Jogger, who had been left for dead by her attackers and also left with brain injuries, was forced to arrive and leave the courthouse under heavy security.

Of course, there were no consequences for Sharpton . . .

Are commentators now worried about bringing up these subjects because of the subsequent vacating of the sentences of the Central Park’s Jogger’s assailants? They shouldn’t worry: the acquittals were false.

As of today, Townhall’s Larry Elder is the only journalist who has mentioned the lynch-mob hatred Sharpton whipped up against the Jogger and, by extension, other white victims of interracial rape. Elder writes:

In 1989, a young white woman, dubbed the “Central Park jogger,” was monstrously raped and nearly beaten to death. Sharpton insisted — despite the defendants’ confessions — that her black attacker-suspects were innocent, modern-day Scottsboro Boys trapped in “a fit of racial hysteria.” Sharpton charged that the jogger’s boyfriend did it and organized protests outside the courthouse, chanting, “The boyfriend did it!” and denouncing the victim as a “whore!”

Sharpton appealed for a psychiatrist to examine the victim, generously saying: “It doesn’t even have to be a black psychiatrist. … We’re not endorsing the damage to the girl — if there was this damage.”

Elder feels the need to note that the defendants in the Jogger case had their sentences vacated in 2002, but he didn’t look closely enough:

(The convictions of the accused were eventually vacated, despite their taped confessions, after another man — whose DNA matched — confessed to the rape in 2002.)

The vacating of those sentences was a travesty, orchestrated by activists, an aged and compromised Robert Morgenthau, and a cowardly judge, all of whom knew that the youths’ confessions were limited to information that was not in any way contradicted by the later revelation that the sole DNA found at the crime scene belonged to serial rapist/killer Matias Reyes. None of the defendants’ confessions indicated that they had ejaculated at the scene of the crime: they had only admitted that another man committed the rape as they helped restrain and torture the young woman.

Reyes himself admitted the crime only after the statute of limitations reportedly ran out — which should never have happened. He was already serving 33 to life, with the strong likelihood of no release for the serial rapist murderer, whose crime “signature” included offering victims “their eyes or their life” and stabbing them around the eyes to enhance the terror of his attacks. Already convicted for vicious crimes including the rape/torture/murder of a pregnant woman in front of her children, Reyes’ subsequent “confession” that he was the sole assailant should never have been believed — nor did police and prosecutors involved in the case believe it.

”He is a complete lunatic,” said Michael Sheehan, a former homicide investigator whose work helped prosecute Mr. Reyes for the murder of Lourdes Gonzalez.

Ann Coulter documented the entire sordid saga of the vacating of the sentences in her book Demonicand was hysterically persecuted for doing so. Prosecutor Linda Fairstein was accused of a wide variety of sins for speaking the truth about the evidence in the case: the few others defending the convictions were also tarred, but not in the personal, racial way reserved for Fairstein, the victim, and later, Ann Coulter. The Village Voice stooped to new racial lows by insinuating guilt on the part of the victim, who implicated nobody as she remembered nothing of the attack, and sleazily accusing Fairstein of “Ash-blonde Ambition.”

Others who should have spoken out about the travesty of wrongful acquittal remained silent, doubtlessly out of fear of the racial cudgel.

On April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old investment banker went for a run through Central Park, whereupon she was attacked by a violent mob, savagely beaten, raped and left for dead. By the time the police found her at 1:30 a.m. that night, she was beaten so badly, she had lost three-fourths of her blood and the police couldn’t tell if she was male or female. The homicide unit of the Manhattan D.A.’s office initially took the case because not one of her doctors believed she would be alive in the morning.Confessions were obtained in accordance with the law, with the defendants’ parents present at all police interrogations. All but one of the confessions was videotaped. After a six-week hearing solely on the admissibility of the confessions, a judge ruled them lawful.At the trials, evidence was ruled on by the judge and tested in court. Witnesses were presented for both sides and subjected to cross-examination.One witness, for example, an acquaintance of one of the defendants, testified that when she talked to him in jail after the arrests, he told her that he hadn’t raped the jogger, he “only held her legs down while (another defendant) f–ked her.” (That’s enough for a rape conviction.

In the opposite of a “rush to judgment,” two multi-ethnic juries deliberated for 10 days and 11 days, respectively, before unanimously finding the defendants guilty of most crimes charged — though innocent of others. The convictions were later upheld on appeal.The only way liberals could get those convictions overturned was to change venues from a courtroom to a newsroom. So that’s what they did.The convictions were vacated based not on a new trial or on new evidence, but solely on the “confession” of Matias Reyes.Coincidentally, this serial rapist and murderer had nothing to lose by confessing to the rape — and much to gain by claiming that he had acted alone, including a highly desirable prison transfer.As with the tribunals during the French Revolution, the show trials were based on a lie, to wit, that Reyes’ confession constituted “new evidence” that might have led to a different verdict at trial.In fact, Reyes’ admission that he had raped the jogger changed nothing about the evidence presented in the actual trials. It was always known that others had participated in the attack on the jogger. It was always known that none of the defendants’ DNA — a primitive science back in 1989 — was found on the jogger.This is why prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer said in her summation to the jury: “Others who were not caught raped her and got away.”The only new information Reyes provided was that he was one of those who “got away.”But 13 years later, the show trial was re-litigated in the backrooms of law offices and newsrooms by a remarkably undiverse group of Irish and Jewish, college-educated New Yorkers. They lied about the evidence in order to vindicate a mob and destroy trust in the judicial system.

The sentence vacating was orchestrated and exploited by Innocence Project activists who felt no compunction about subjecting a brutalized rape victim to injustice and even more unnecessary suffering. It also greased Sharpton’s re-entry into power society — all on the back of an innocent rape victim.

(Guy in the middle is Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Because hanging out with people who try to get mobs to attack a rape victim is so . . . educational.)

Now the Innocence Project is codifying its lies about the Jogger’s assailants in their false science of “wrongful conviction causes” and shilling state-by-state legislation based on the same.

And abetting them are professors from every law school in the nation. No legal academician, to date, has demonstrated a drop of intellectual integrity regarding this case or the entirely faked “statistics on wrongful confession,” “statistics” produced almost wholly from this single case. Law professors collectively lack the spine — and ethics — to risk being targeted if they dare to question the Innocence Project’s increasingly wild statistical and causal claims.

Many people voiced compassion for the Jogger in 1989, but virtually nobody stood with her in the wake of this misogyny-drenched, manufactured, legal re-lynching. This time, as we revisit Al Sharpton’s violent, prejudiced, hate-mongering, the real story should not be ignored.

Remember 2010, when “homeless sex offenders living under the Julia Tuttle Bridge” became the latest endangered seals of the liberal left? I blogged about it here:

[R]eporters coast to coast set out to comb bridges and underpasses, eagerly seeking encampments of homeless sex offenders. Lightening their trip by jettisoning the heavy burden of objectivity, they finally stumbled upon a handful of men shacked up in the woods outside Marietta, Georgia — living there for about five minutes while other housing was being found for them. . . Meanwhile, nobody really noticed the hundreds of sex offenders living nearby in perfectly legal housing, just like nobody noticed the thousands of non-homeless sex offenders in Miami.

Other than the Miami encampment and the blink-of-an-eye Atlanta thing, the only other reported sighting of a homeless sex offender was by the New York Times’ Dan Barry, and that was entirely accidental: Barry didn’t realize that the manipulative old coot he was slavishly profiling was actually an absconded child rapist . . . because he didn’t do a simple thirty-second online fact-check to confirm any part of the man’s sob story.

Fast-forward two years. Homeless sex offenders don’t need to rely on Dan Barry for tea and sympathy anymore: they’ve found a brand new affinity group in the Occupy Movement:

Woman Raped at Occupy New Haven: Cops

Police charged England Gamble, 53, of New Haven, with sexual assault.

Gamble is on the state sex offender registry for a first-degree sexual assault conviction in 1991. The registry said he was released from prison in 1996 and did not register his address.

Note that he served merely five years for first-degree sexual assault: thank you, ACLU! Et. al!

Rather than taking steps to ensure that no other sex offenders are hiding out in their camp, Occupy New Haven is busy denying that Gamble and his victim were part of their movement. But New Haven police point out that Gamble would not have been able to insinuate himself in the area if not for the now-federally-protected protest encampment:

Members of the Occupy movement said neither Gamble nor the victim are members of the movement. They said both are homeless and set up a tent nearby. Police have not classified Gamble as homeless, but said if the Occupy movement was not on the green, that Gamble would not have been able to set up camp there.

So where does Occupy New Haven stand on sex offender registration, the pertinent issue here? I very much doubt they support registration rules for convicted rapists. After all, they’re part of a movement that includes the entire rainbow of anti-incarceration activism and seeks to “empty the prisons.” They hate cops. They view law enforcement as oppression. They discourage women from even reporting sexual assaults to the police.

This past Monday I delivered a speech at the Delta Kappa Epsilon house at Wesleyan University. I had been invited to speak by DKE and another fraternity at Wesleyan, Beta Theta Pi, because I had written an op-ed article in June for the Los Angeles Times titled “War Waged on College Fraternities.” That was the theme of my Wesleyan speech, too. I had expected the audience to consist mostly of “Deke” and Beta brothers plus other members of Wesleyan’s tiny Greek-letter community who felt beleaguered by efforts of university administrators to regulate and restrict their activities, and calls by activists to put fraternities out of business altogether. But my speech had been advertised in the student newspaper. The room where I spoke–the former ballroom, now all-purpose party room, of the worn nineteenth-century mansion that served as DKE’s house—was packed with an overflow crowd of some 75 young people. At least half of them were non-fraternity members, many of whom had never set foot inside a fraternity house. From them I learned something: how thoroughly college students, at least students at elite colleges such as Wesleyan, have absorbed and internalized all of the negative things—especially about fraternities as supposed hotbeds of sexual assault—that professors and administrators have been harping on for at least two decades. There seemed to be a consensus that university authorities weren’t tough enough in clamping down on Greek-letter societies.

These bright and articulate young people believed everything. They believed, for example, that college campuses are rife with sexual assaults committed by male students on their female classmates. “One out of every four college women is raped,” declared a young man who was obviously not part of the Deke/Beta group during a post-speech question-and-answer session. “That’s been under-reported,” he said. “Actually, it’s been over-reported,” I responded. I explained, as Heather Mac Donald explained in her City Journal article “The Campus Rape Myth,” that the one-in-four statistic came from a single flawed study debunked many times over the years. . .

A male student standing in the back announced, “I don’t feel safe in this room.” “In this room?,” I queried incredulously, pointing around the spacious ballroom with its neoclassical molding and high fireplaces at each end, both topped by oil paintings of men who appeared to be illustrious Dekes of the nineteenth century. “In this room, where you’re speaking your mind freely and everyone is listening respectfully?” “I don’t mean now, but when the parties are going on, when it’s dark and there’s a lot of loud music and drinking and people are being victimized.” A female student chimed in that she didn’t feel “safe,” either. (“Safe” is politically correct campus jargon for “liking what I see or hear.”) A second male student added his two cents: “Everyone knows there’s a lot of rape going on in fraternity houses.” He got a hiss or two from the Greek-letter contingent but the main audience response was the poetry-reading/Occupy Wall Street version of applause: an enthusiastic round of finger-snapping.

~~~

Also this week, the New Haven/Wesleyan Occupiers took time out of their studied avoidance of the rapists amidst them to throw condoms at Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia. You know, in the name of free speech:

[S]even protesters took off their day clothes and stood up to reveal orange Guantanamo Bay suits and black hoods, protesting Scalia’s complicity in war and torture. These protesters, after refusing to sit down, were escorted out. Simultaneously, four students dropped hundreds of condoms from a balcony into the crowd to show opposition to Scalia’s assaults on reproductive freedom and privacy. The condoms bore the label “Practice Safe Sodomy,” referring to his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas arguing in favor of upholding homophobic anti-sodomy laws. Students also unfurled banners that read, “Scalia Represents the People Inc.” and “There Can Be No Justice in the Court of the Conquered” to oppose his support of corporate personhood and close ties to corporate interests, as well as a national history of colonial subjugation and imperial enslavement which the Supreme Court has codified and enabled. More Wesleyan students stood up with signs supporting the protesters’ message in overflow rooms.

There are a variety of reasons that students have decided to protest. A media advisory earlier this week said, “Scalia represents highly unjust and oppressive political system, which for example appointed George W. Bush as unelected president in 2000 and increased corporate control of elections in the 2010 Citizens United ruling. In contrast, the Scalia Welcoming Committee is a truly democratic, non-hierarchical group, inspired by the Occupy movement, Arab Spring and global anti-austerity protests. We strongly reject the Wesleyan administration’s choice to invite such a bigoted, sexist, corrupt puppet of the super-rich to speak.”

Occupy New Haven believes in safe sex for Supreme Court Justices, but not sexual safety for Occupy protesters. They believe in free speech for themselves so they can remain silent as sexual assaults are committed in their camp, while believing in suppressing the speech rights of frat brothers who are tired of being falsely accused of rape. By them.

Fluke testified that she knew a fellow Georgetown student who opted to not report a rape because she was worried that her insurance wouldn’t cover the rape examination:

One student told us that she knew birth control wasn’t covered, and she assumed that’s how Georgetown’s insurance handled all of women’s sexual healthcare, so when she was raped, she didn’t go to the doctor even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections because she thought insurance wasn’t going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman’s reproductive health.

This statement is utterly unbelievable. Does anyone really believe in the existence of a Georgetown student who was raped, then decided to not report the existence of a dangerous, predatory criminal because she might have to pony up more than a co-pay to have a rape kit examination? Does anyone believe that this alleged victim wouldn’t at least call 911, or the local rape crisis center, or the Georgetown Woman’s Center, or any of the student anti-rape groups that plaster campuses with their posters denouncing rape, if she was that worried about paying for a rape kit in the aftermath of experiencing a rape?

If this extremely politically convenient woman really does exist, then any of those phone calls would have reassured her that, thanks to the hard work of people like . . . me . . . no woman in this country needs to pay for a rape kit. The federal government requires states to cover these costs at the risk of losing funding. Washington D.C. also covers the costs. State victims’ compensation boards cover the costs. Rape kit collection is covered even if a woman decides to have a rape kit collected while choosing to not report the rape to the police.

But even if this unlikely, unsympathetic, alleged victim does exist, Fluke’s testimony is still a lie because it was designed to exploit this non-issue. Ms. Fluke exploited real rape victims in order to advance a non-argument for prescription coverage for contraceptives: what on earth should we call that? She tried to create false fear about the cost of rape kits in order to promote a different cause. And that is exploitative. Repugnant. If one real victim worries about this now because Sandra Fluke used rape victims’ fears this way on the witness stand, then it is on Fluke’s head, and on the heads of the other professional reproductive rights activists who carefully tooled this testimony alongside her.

Yet not one congressperson challenged Fluke’s rape kit testimony. Not one mainstream media reporter paused for a gut-check . . . or a fact-check. The last time anyone in the media bothered to talk about rape kits was during Sarah Palin’s run for vice-president. Back then, Salon and Huffington Post and a thousand Democratic operatives tried like hell to pin the “not paying for rape kits” charge on Palin. They never found a smoking gun, but the story made national news, not once, but over and over and over again.

They didn’t do this because they cared about rape victims in Wasilla. They did it to play a political game, with rape victims serving as the kickball. That’s how much leftists, and leftist feminists, really care about real rape.

It should be noted that in the wake of Fluke, not one rape crisis representative has come forward to reassure women that they will not have to pay for rape kits, not in Washington DC, not anywhere in the United States. Where are these advocates? Where are all the professional rape crisis workers, the people paid to tell the rest of us these things, because it is supposed to be so important to educate the public and dispel misconceptions and encourage reporting?

Where are the campus rape activists, who ought to be out there reassuring women that they don’t really have to pay if they go to a hospital for medical care after a rape?

Where are Tori Amos and Christina Ricchi and Neil Gaiman, those brave spokespeople who lend their names to RAINN, the very well-funded, national, message-driven-anti-rape-non-profit that is supposed to exist to do rape education but somehow hasn’t gotten around to issuing a press release correcting the false information perpetrated by Sandra Fluke? RAINN raises more than a million dollars a year to “educate the public about sexual assault and conduct outreach to at-risk populations.” Don’t give your money to people like this.

Fluke went on The View, and not one of the allegedly pro-woman women on that program bothered to pause for a moment to reassure viewers that no rape victim needs to worry about the cost of collecting a rape kit, because doing so would break the narrative, which is that the vicious Jesuit priests at Georgetown are keeping women from reporting rape.

Rush Limbaugh didn’t silence these people. They silenced themselves, because rape is just an issue to use when it’s politically expedient. Rape is the red-headed stepchild of the political left. It’s a crime issue, a sentencing issue, a recidivism issue, and frequently a race issue: as such, the Left works hard to control the message while sometimes actually opposing measures that would achieve justice for victims. Every honest person working in rape advocacy knows that the price of admission to the left-wing table is to avoid talking about the prevalence of politically incorrect rapes (white victim, minority offender and even minority victim-minority offender) while hammering away at the campus date rape issue (so long as the accused fit the desired stereotype). Honest activists know that the types of reforms that really reduce rape — minimum mandatory sentencing, truth-in-sentencing, post-release offender registration — are opposed by the Left, so they frequently don’t even bother to show up for hearings on such bills. And they know to keep their pretty lips zipped on the lies perpetrated by the hate crimes industry in the interest of keeping heterosexual female rape victims from cluttering up the all-important hate crime stats.

While I worked on sentencing reform that would actually reduce the prevalence of rape in Atlanta, the campus rape activists and the local affiliate of RAINN there were super-busy keeping rape victims from being counted as hate crime victims (unless they were gay), in order to please the gay and ethnic-rights activists of the Left. They were busily raising money for campaigns that hectored all men about rape while they studiously ignored real rape cases that didn’t fit their ideological needs. They never complained about jurors letting offenders off, for instance, because doing so would involve wading into politically perilous waters. They never bothered to address the increasingly toxic myths about the prevalence of false accusations being churned out by the Innocence Project. They pointed fingers at frat brothers, got their degrees in Women’s Studies, blogged about their sex partners, became fake lesbians to enhance their shot at the tenure track, and never once sat in a courtroom watching jurors decide that some 13-year old hadn’t really been raped by her mommy’s boyfriend because she “wanted it.”

I want to make something extremely clear: the first-wave and second-wave feminists didn’t do that. Those women worked hard and took political risks to help rape victims and punish rapists. They damned the political costs. They worked gratefully with sympathetic police and partnered happily with sympathetic Republicans. They didn’t wallow in thrall to the criminal defense bar. But by the 1990’s, the third-wave, sex-positivity, politically correct thingies who followed them were literally undoing the work of the women who preceded them. By 1999, there was a definite schism between the older service-providers — women who actually spent evenings working in the gynecology emergency rooms and staffing rape crisis centers — and the Emily Bazelon ilk, the well-paid third-wave activists who unravelled those efforts in the morning light.

It was an ugly scene, the same scene now being played out nationally, thanks to Sandra Fluke’s decision to lie to Congress about rape. What a nasty piece of work. What a shame about the feminist movement.